How to mark the fifth anniversary of a pontificate that is a high-octane news generator, where hardly a fortnight goes by without an unexpected turn of events? Perhaps it’s instructive to go back to March 2013, and see how the surprises came early…

A trial of two former Vatican bank officials is looming, and with it, a question: is the Vatican able to bring its financial house into some semblance of order? The first hearing in the case was slated for Thursday, but was postponed at the last minute upon request from defence attorneys and lawyers for the Vatican bank…

In his Physiology of Taste, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, that philosopher of the delicious, describes Lenten fasting during his youth in 18th-century France: “Nobody breakfasted, and therefore all were more hungry than usual…

Who would have thought that Alan Partridge would turn out to be a prophet? When, in all his tragic desperation, he pitched “Youth hostelling with Chris Eubank” to the director of programming at the BBC, little did we know that this ludicrous little joke would turn out to be an accurate prediction of the kind of celebrity-led dross that would soon be flooding our screens…

Anyone who complains that there aren’t enough opportunities for women in the arts has never seen an opera about nuns – like Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites which has just been playing at the Guildhall School…

In Search of Mary Shelley by Fiona Sampson, Profile, £18.99 Published to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Frankenstein, this is not a straightforward biography so much as a series of fascinating glimpses of its precocious author…

Nucleus by Rory Clements, Zaffre, £12.99 All the best thrillers inform as well as entertain, and Rory Clements offers us the choreography as well as the tap dance in this novel set in Cambridge on the eve of World War II…

The dramatic and extraordinary story of a six-year-old Jewish boy from Bologna, secretly baptised as a baby by his Italian nursemaid, then taken to live in Rome in 1858 and raised as a Catholic despite an international outcry, is recounted by the Italian journalist Vittorio Messori in Kidnapped by the Vatican? The Unpublished Memoirs of Edgardo Mortara (Ignatius Press, 190pp, £12.99)…